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April 27, 2002
Jordy Cummings
Stuck Inside the Journalism School
Pyramid
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Set
This Flag on Fire!
April 26, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Act
Now to Stop the Killing
of an Innocent Man
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
April 25, 2002
Francis
A. Boyle
Home
Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration
David
Vest
Code
Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
Responsibility
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
Resources:
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The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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A Pocket Guide to
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April 27, 2002
The Block Curse
Strikes Again!
Adelphia Going Down
By Dr. Susan Block
So, did you dump all your Adelphia stock like
I told you to? No? Didn't take me seriously 10 months ago
when I said SELL, huh? Thought I was just some distraught
public access pornographer, and that Adelphia, overseen by those
fine upstanding censors John J. Rigas and Sons, was as sound
an investment as woolens in winter. Well, think again.
Adelphia Communications Corp. stock has
been plummeting into the muck ever since the end of March when
the Rigas Boys were forced to admit that the Securities and Exchange
Commission had opened a formal investigation into their accounting
practices. It seems that Adelphia, now America's sixth-largest
cable television operator, failed to report that it had guaranteed
as much as $2.7 billion in private debts incurred by the family
of its founder, John Rigas. Now it's stock is down 64% since
March 26, 2002 when, since June of 2001, it was already down
by more than 50%.
Why am I not surprised? Because the
biggest censors often turn out to be the biggest financial frauds.
Censorship is one kind of cover-up. Deceptive Accounting is
another. Censors don't want viewers to see what they deem naughty
sex practices. Financial tricksters don't want investors to
see their own naughty bookkeeping practices. Hey, it's all about
covering up figures.
Take Charles Keating, founder of such
energetic censorship groups as Citizens for Decent Literature
and Citizens for Decency through Law before he turned into the
Citizen-Poster Boy for the American Savings & Loan Disaster
when his Lincoln S&L went belly-up. Then there were the
Hunt Brothers, the oil-rich, John Bircher Billionaires from Texas
who went from being one of the wealthiest, most right-wing (virtually
pro-Nazi), Born-Again Christian families in America to declaring
bankruptcy to being convicted of conspiring to corner the silver
market. Now we have the Rigas Boys, moralizing TV Censors who
don't want you to see boobs or their balance sheets.
Now that's obscene.
Beware of
Those Who are Holier than Thou, for Often They are Fleecers of
their Own Flocks.
Since Adelphia Communications is not
as famous as Lincoln Savings & Loan, a little explanation
may be in order here: Adelphia is a family-operated, publicly-traded
company based in the tiny little backwater town of Coudersport,
Pennsylvania. Until it found itself smack in the middle of a
leviathan accounting scandal, Adelphia was busy swallowing up
cable TV companies all over America, including three in LA, one
in the lovely liberal community of West LA (formerly called Century
Cable), where The Dr. Susan Block Show had been airing
without censorship for almost 10 years.
"Family-operated" sounds so
warm and cozy, but cold and calculating might be more apt adjectives
for the family that operates Adelphia. This would be the Rigas
Family, headed up by John J. Rigas who, until his beloved Adelphia
became the Enron of Cable TV, was determined to impose his own
slightly-left-of-Jerry-Falwell form of Family Values on as much
of America as he could buy, striking even in the heart of liberal
LA. A man who refused to let you see what he didn't want you
to see (in my show's case, a few naked people), when what he
really didn't want you to see was his sons' hands stuck
in the Adelphia stockholders' cookie jar.
For John J. Rigas is just one man, and
it takes more than one man to create a dark, chilling shroud
of censorship on a cable TV company that has always prided itself
on serving one of the brightest, most open, most liberal communities
in the country. There are a few other men who have helped John
Rigas to censor West LA, plus as much of America as he could
buy, perhaps illegally, through loans to a closely held partnership
that wasn't included on Adelphia's balance sheet. And when I
say men, I mean MEN. Not many women are in power positions in
the Adelphia organization. At least three of these men are
related to John J. Rigas, being his sons: Michael J. Rigas, Vice
President of Operations, Timothy J. Rigas, Vice President &
CFO, and James P. Rigas, Vice President for Strategic Planning.
This is the Adelphia Dynasty who treated their publicly held
company, and even their subscribers, like their own little kingdom
in more ways that one. John's Three Sons. No daughters, unless
he keeps them home in the kitchen or convent, or wherever he
keeps his wife, who also is curiously absent from the Rigas family
operations.
The Greek word "Adelphia" means
brothers, not sisters. That is, Adelphia is run by a quartet
of Good Ol' Boys, and when I say "old," I mean old-fashioned,
their aim being to take America back to the 1950's when Father
knew Best, Mother took Valium and kids considered suicide if
their family life didn't quite match that of Ozzie & Harriet,
or maybe back to Victorian times when parents put children's
genitals in torture chambers so they wouldn't masturbate. Yessir,
keep the women in the kitchen, and let the men go out to work
and steal money from their stockholders, and let no one see a
naked vulva or God forbid, a penis on public access TV. That's
Family Values, Rigas-style. And it's a slippery slope. Censoring
images leads to censoring words, which leads to censoring ideas
and then actions, including unsavory business practices. When
truth is censored, liars prevail.
Censorship is all over America these
days. It's in the air like the smog, polluting our natural atmosphere,
clogging our brains like smog clogs our breathing passages.
America is the most powerful country in the world right now,
and it's in the self-destructive throes of a Full-On Censorship
Crusade. It's coming from all directions, from the government
and corporations, from the Right and the Left. But whether it's
right wing reactionary religious fundamentalist ranting or left-wing
politically correct psychobabble, it all adds up to hypocrisy
and oppression, a step backwards in our cultural development
when we have so much potential to move forward. A fall back
into the darkness, tripping over our fears. What did we call
the most repressed, the most censorship-riddled period in Western
History? The Dark Ages.
History knows. Censorship begets ignorance.
Censorship hurts. Censorship kills images, ideas, people, liberty.
Censorship seems easy, when you're in power. "I don't
like what I'm hearing, so I won't let them say it. I don't like
what I'm seeing, so I won't let them show it." And if the
people accept the censorship, then the folks in power stay in
power, and pass it onto their sons-from Bush to Bush, Hunt to
Hunt, Rigas to Rigas. In the Information Age, censorship is
the ultimate oppression of the Haves over the Have-Nots, because
censorship means they won't let you have the information
or images you desire. We're not talking about them not letting
you kill somebody or steal something; we're talking about them
not letting you have information. Censorship means you
only have the information that they want you to have.
Which makes you wonder: What else
could the Adelphia Brotherhood be hiding?
Over 30 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther
King faced another oppressive, hypocritical situation in America,
and he said, "I have a dream." Part of his dream was
that there would come a time when "we would judge each other
not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character."
That dream seemed like a pipedream back then, but at the turn
of the twenty-first century, despite the awful attacks of a few
reactionaries, that dream is coming true. So with all due respect
and humility, I'd like to borrow a page from Dr. Martin's book,
and say "I have a dream." Or perhaps, considering
who I am, I should say: I have a fantasy...
I have a fantasy that
there will come a time when a woman's genitals will not be considered
obscene.
I have a fantasy that
there will come a time when a man's genitals will not be considered
indecent.
I have a fantasy that
there will come a time when a woman's breasts will not be banned--as
obscene, indecent, offensive, censored, unseeable on American
television.
I have a fantasy that
there will come a time when sex will not be lumped together with
violence as something base, something evil, something that children
should never see.
I have a fantasy that
there will come a time when we will judge people not by their
sexual orientation but by their basic humanity, and not by superstitious,
irrational religious morality but by simple ethics and decency.
I have a fantasy that
there will come a time when censoring beautiful images of human
sexuality like you see on my show will seem as silly as putting
bags over the heads of Congress (in fact, it makes more sense
to put bags over the heads of Congress).
I could go on. I have many fantasies,
and I'm sure you do too. Just remember that the people who want
to censor our fantasies tend to be the ones with something BIG
to hide.
But they can't hide forever. Coudersport
is not the caves of Afghanistan. Thus the Block Curse strikes
another arrogant adversary who grossly underestimated its power:
Adelphia Family Censors. John J. Rigas & Sons: Repent!
Repent of your wicked attempts to censor your viewers and fool
your investors! Repent, or all the riches you have earned off
the backs of these people shall slip through your slippery fingers
like dust.
To join the fight against censorship,
e-mail me at liberties@blockbooks.com.
Dr. Susan Block
is a sex educator, host of the Dr. Susan Block radio show, and
author of The 10 Commandments of Pleasure. Visit her website
at: http://www.drsusanblock.com/
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